5400 RPM drives for my setup... Nope. VMs would run like a dog. Same with video encoding and performance. Best off just having a few smaller cap faster drives. This won't sit too well with the media pro and Hypervisor crowd.

VMs are slow enough on a 7200RPM drive... let alone a 5200 RPM drive.

I plan on getting a larger capacity SSD for my VMs when I can afford it.

Use a laptop (most have 5400/5200 RPM drives) and they are hella slow.

he platters act like an internal RAID0. It can read and write to all platters simultaneously.

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Are you sure about that? Because when you look at the performance of the 1,2 and 3TB version of this drive (all of them are 7200RPM and 1TB per platter) it doesn't seem so.
And not to mention the risk of data loss with 8 R/W heads....

The platters act like an internal RAID0. It can read and write to all platters simultaneously. It should also get a nice performance bump going from 750 GB/platter to 1 TB/platter. I think it could hit 200 MB/s sequential.

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Noup. Not by far. Having multiple platters doesn't work like internal RAID.

Are you sure about that? Because when you look at the performance of the 1,2 and 3TB version of this drive (all of them are 7200RPM and 1TB per platter) it doesn't seem so.
And not to mention the risk of data loss with 8 R/W heads....

Noup. Not by far. Having multiple platters doesn't work like internal RAID.

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Yeah, I did some research and the general consensus is that they don't. The main reason why they don't is because a bad sector on one platter would effectively make that area on all platters unusable (capacity would fall much faster due to bad sectors). There's also an issue of circuitry to handle read/writes on 2-5 heads simultaneously.

If they really wanted to improve performance, it is something HDD manufacturers likely could try but, as far as I know, it hasn't been done yet.

Yeah. Actually, multi platerrs HDD are slower than single ones. Imagine data fragmented on different platters...

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That is why defrag exists. Actually multi-platter drives read sequential data better because it can read from more platters at once. It doesn't scale perfectly linearly but pretty close. For any hard drive at the same speed (7200rpm, 5400rpms, etc.) more platters with the same density will generally give you better performance. Increasing platter density while maintaining the same speed will also improve performance. Both cases assume the controller on the hard drive isn't bottlenecked.